Documenting the history of the movement that is encouraging Orlando Health to provide domestic partner benefits, create a diversity office and become culturally competent.
How many voices need to be heard for change to take place?
CLICK HERE AND SIGN THE PETITION TODAY!

Alan Bounville is a man with a mission. Bounville wants to change the laws that deny gays and lesbians the same civil rights enjoyed by heterosexuals. Chained to Freedom is the story of his fight.

It’s not an especially unusual story, although it turns out that Bounville slightly knew Ryan Skipper, the gay man who was beaten and stabbed to death in rural Polk County in 2007 and has become known as Central Florida’s Matthew Shepard.

But it wasn’t Skipper’s murder that galvanized Bounville: It was the refusal of his own employer, Orlando Health, to grant domestic-partner benefits. Bounville quit his job, picketed at a corporate-sponsored event and then moved to New York to fight the fight ion a national scale.

Good activists aren’t always practiced actors, and Bounville could work on speaking up and on not making his material sound so melodramatic. (In drama, less is often more.) Still, a little agitprop theater is nearly always a good thing. I only wish Bounville weren’t preaching to the choir.

Alan Bounville is a man with a mission. Bounville wants to change the laws that deny gays and lesbians the same civil rights enjoyed by heterosexuals. Chained to Freedom is the story of his fight.

It’s not an especially unusual story, although it turns out that Bounville slightly knew Ryan Skipper, the gay man who was beaten and stabbed to death in rural Polk County in 2007 and has become known as Central Florida’s Matthew Shepard.

But it wasn’t Skipper’s murder that galvanized Bounville: It was the refusal of his own employer, Orlando Health, to grant domestic-partner benefits. Bounville quit his job, picketed at a corporate-sponsored event and then moved to New York to fight the fight ion a national scale.

Good activists aren’t always practiced actors, and Bounville could work on speaking up and on not making his material sound so melodramatic. (In drama, less is often more.) Still, a little agitprop theater is nearly always a good thing. I only wish Bounville weren’t preaching to the choir.

About Orlando Health Diversity Initiative

I am a former Orlando Health team member and current donor in good standing with the organization. For over a year a group of Orlando Health team members, including myself have been encouraging Orlando Health to be more culturally competent. After presenting a formal proposal (which can be viewed as the first post on this blog) to the leadership of Orlando Health, nothing has happened.
So, I decided to start a petition (see second post on this blog) to gather voices in support of the proposal.
Here I post weekly videos 'showing' the growing support for the petition. This blog will end when Orlando Health has a fully functioning diversity/multicultural office, provides opportunities for its team members to meet and discuss diversity/multicultural issues, provides domestic partner health benefits to its team members, updates its team member and patient policies to be in line with true cultural competence and embraces the never ending work in this arena to better fulfill its mission.